SOURCE: "Propaganda and Hard Facts in Charles Reade's Didactic Novels: A Study of It Is Never Too Late to Mend and Hard Cash, " in Renaissance and Modern Studies, Vol. 4, 1960, pp. 135-49.

[In the following excerpt, Smith contends that although Reade drew on factual sources for his didactic novels, he exaggerated and introduced melodramatic elements in the tradition of the sensation novel.]

'Eccentric fact makes improbable fiction, and improbable fiction is not impressive.'

The Times, 2 Jan. 1864, reviewing Hard Cash.

'All fiction, worth a button, is founded on facts,' wrote Charles Reade in the preface to his novel A Simpleton (1873). To help him write his novels he evolved a'system', which can be summed up as the use of a great deal of fact and of a little imagination. The novel was not his favourite medium, so it was convenient for him to have a rule-of-thumb to work by. For him a good plot was essential in a novel. He found invention difficult, and his imagination needed a ground plan of facts to work upon, so he made a virtue of necessity and insisted that good fiction is founded on fact.

In Reade's fourteen novels the proportion and kind of 'hard fact' vary considerably. Sometimes he used factual evidence to substantiate social criticism which is only subsidiary to the main theme, for example the description of a lunatic asylum in A Terrible Temptation (1871); the story of the prostitute, Rhoda Somerset, in the same novel; Rhoda Gale's struggles to be recognised as a doctor in A Woman Hater (1877); or a businessman's evil practices to cheat the underwriters of insurance money in Foul Play (written with Dion Boucicault 1868). But the three 'novels with a purpose'—It is Never Too Late to Mend (1856), Hard Cash (1863) and Put Yourself in His Place (1870)—had as their shaping impulse indignation at contemporary abuses and were meant to silence criticism by their factual accuracy. In Hard Cash Reade assumes an air of authority as he writes of Alfred's letter to the Commissioners of Lunacy:

To the best of my belief no madman, however slightly touched, or however cunning, ever wrote a letter so gentle yet strong, so earnest yet calm, so short yet full, and withal so lucid and cleanly jointed as this was: and I am no contemptible judge; for I have accumulated during the last few years a large collection of letters from persons deranged in various degrees, and studied them minutely, more minutely than most Psychologicals study anything but Pounds, Shillings and Verbiage (Hard Cash, Chapter 34, pp. 382, 383).¹

Criticism, however, obstinately refused to be silenced. While the book was appearing as Very Hard Cash in All the Year Round (28 March-26 Dec., 1863) a Dr. Bushnan protested to the Daily News against 'the terrible slander cast upon a body of professional men to which I am proud to belong', and challenged Reade to quote evidence to prove that a sane man could be unlawfully imprisoned in a private lunatic asylum. He replied spiritedly, marshalling an impressive array of cases. (See letter dated 5 Dec., 1868, quoted at the beginning of Hard Cash, Chatto and Windus 1895; and letters at beginning of undated Chatto and Windus edition marked 'new edition'.)

When a novelist protests so vehemently that the basis of his social novels is factual, the strength of his social criticism may be tested by comparing the source of the facts with the facts as they appear in the novel. This kind of comparison also indicates how the novelist's imagination works on the 'hard facts' and what he makes of them in the novel as a whole. It is outside the scope of this essay to examine in detail the sources of It is Never Too Late to Mend, Hard Cash and Put Yourself in His Place, but as an example of Reade's use of factual evidence in novels purporting to criticise abuses in contemporary society, I intend to examine the facts on which were based the prison scenes in It is Never Too Late to Mend and the lunacy scenes in Hard Cash, as these are more interesting and more successful novels than Put Yourself in His Place.

The main source for the scenes in … Gaol is the Royal Commissioners' Report on Birmingham Borough Prison after Edward Andrews, aged fifteen, had hanged himself on 28 April, 1853. At the time the prison was governed by William Austin, who had established there the system of confining the prisoners separately. The chaplain was the Rev. Ambrose Sherwin who, after Andrews's suicide, had made a statement about the 'illegal and excessive punishments inflicted on the deceased and on other prisoners'.² Whereupon Mr. Perry, the district inspector of prisons, instituted an enquiry.

Among the facts of the Report are these. Andrews was imprisoned for stealing four pounds of beef. It was his third offence. The chaplain described him as 'a very ignorant poor boy' and 'a very neglected desolate child' but 'a mild, quiet, docile boy'. The governor thought him 'sullen' and 'dogged'.

In the prison there were cranks which the prisoners had to turn—10,000 revolutions for a day's work:

… we were assured that, in order to accomplish such a task, a boy would necessarily exert a force equal to one fourth of the ordinary work of a draught horse; … that no human being, whether adult or juvenile, could continue to perform such an amount of labour of this kind for several consecutive days, especially on prison diet, without wasting much and suffering greatly (Report of the Commissioners on Birmingham Borough Prison, op. cit., p. vi).

A prisoner who failed to achieve his task at the crank was illegally put on a bread and water diet. Also in the prison was the 'punishment jacket', originally meant to restrain violent and dangerous prisoners but illegally used by Austin as a punishment:

… it must be an engine of positive torture … This mode of punishment,—which was of ordinary and indeed almost daily occurrence in the prison during the greater part of the year 1852 and the early part of 1853, which was unquestionably altogether illegal, and was of a very cruel, painful, and irritating nature … (ibid., p. viii).

The visiting magistrates were lax. Mr. Howard Luckcock, seeing a boy strapped into a jacket and being told that he had damaged a crank and been violent to the warders, made no inquiry as to the authority for the infliction of the punishment, nor reported it to the board of visiting justices, but

… in the prisoner's presence, expressed his opinion that 'It was very proper; that he hoped he (the prisoner) would soon be sorry for his conduct, and then the governor, he had no doubt, would release him' (ibid., p. viii).

A prisoner who fainted in a punishment jacket was drenched with water. The Prisoners' Misconduct Book was not a faithful record of punishments inflicted. For example, all cases of the use of the punishment jacket were not noted in the book.

After passing several days at the crank, and continually being deprived of his food and punished in the jacket,

On the 26th of April, Andrews broke the bar of his cell window, and again damaged his crank, and his cell was found to be dirty. On that occasion the governor intimated to him that he should not punish him again, but should report him to the justices, and ordered that he should be without his bed till 10 o'clock P.M.; that is, from 5.30 P.M., the ordinary time of locking up. On the 27th, the prisoner broke the glass of his crank machine, and was also detected talking through the window to another boy, and expressing his determination, in coarse language, not to do the work. The governor in consequence visited him, and repeated the intimation that he should not punish him, but report him to the justices. On the same night, about 10 o'clock, the night watchman, coming into his cell to give him his bed (of which he had on that evening been again deprived), found him hanging by his hammock strap to his handkerchief from one of the bars of the window, dead. The chaplain expressed a decided opinion that the sufferings this boy endured, from the punishments he underwent and from the pangs of hunger, drove him to the commission of suicide (ibid., p. x).

The description of the sufferings in … Gaol, then, is based on fact. The Report proves the existence of illegal punishments and lax magistrates like the Mr. Woodcock (obviously a play on Luckcock) of Reade's novel. Young Josephs's history and the opinions the chaplain, Mr. Eden, and the governor, Mr. Hawes, had of him are also based on fact.

In the prison scenes of It is Never Too Late to Mend Reade used the novelist's appeal to publicise two specific abuses, illegal cruelty practised in prisons, especially in Birmingham Prison by Lieutenant Austin, and the lack of imagination evident in the legalised 'separate' system. He needed ineluctable facts. But he was writing a novel, not a pamphlet, and 'in order to give the glow of life to brute fact it must be transmuted by passion' (Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook, 1952, Preface, p. vi). Reade's passion was a burning indignation against inhuman cruelty and senseless waste of human energy, but a contemporary critic considered that it distorted rather than transmuted the facts:

… the general conclusion which we have drawn from a careful examination of Mr. Reade's book, with the authorities on which it professes to be founded, is, that it hardly contains a single statement of a matter of fact which can be entirely depended upon, though every statement respecting … Gaol, which it contains, is founded upon something mentioned in the Report of the Commissioners who inquired into Birmingham Prison ('The Licence of Modern Novelists', Edinburgh Review. July 1857).

The critic carefully marshals the facts of Josephs's life in It is Never Too Late to Mend and compares them with the Report's description of Andrews's life. At first the differences seem trivial enough. There is no mention in the Report that the jacket's leather collar was jagged and so more painful, as Reade described it:

This collar, by a refinement of cruelty, was made with unbound edges, so that when the victim, exhausted with the cruel cramp that racked his aching bones in the fierce grip of Hawes' infernal machine, sank his heavy head and drooped his chin, the jagged collar saved him directly, and, lacerating the flesh, drove him away from even this miserable approach to ease (Chapter 11, p. 104).

Andrews, unlike Josephs, was not confined in the jacket the afternoon before he committed suicide. He was never deprived of his bed for a whole night, as Josephs is, and the proximate cause of suicide was the threat to report him to the magistrates, not Austin's punishment. (Here, however, it can be argued that Austin had threatened to report him before, but the threat had not induced suicide. Also it is ironical that Austin should threaten the report, declaring that he himself would punish Andrews no more, when that very night Andrews's bed was removed. Reade was justified in making the suicide the cumulative result of ill-treatment.)

The writer points out that there is no evidence that Austin abused Andrews, as Reade made Hawes abuse Josephs the afternoon before the suicide:

'I'll make your life hell to you, you young vagabond. You are hardly used, are you? all you have ever known isn't a stroke with a feather to what I'll make you know by and by. Wait till tomorrow comes, you shall see what I can do when I am put to it' (Chapter 18, p. 218).

The writer omits several other divergences between the fact and the fiction. Josephs has served no previous sentences, and he is not rebuked for bad language. Also in the novel there is the sentimental addition of the starving mother for whom the boy stole. Again, all the cranks in … Gaol are non-productive, wasting man's energy:

This clergyman (Eden) had a secret horror and hatred of the crank. He called it a monster got by folly upon science to degrade labour below theft; for 'theft is immoral, but crank labour is immoral and idiotic too', said he. The crank is a diabolical engine to keep thieves from ever being anything but thieves … This antipathy to the crank quite overpowered him … It cut his understanding like a knife to see a man turn a handle for hours and nothing come of it (Chapter 14, p. 131).

But, according to the Report, the cranks in Birmingham Prison were productive:

Not long after the opening of the prison, two crank machines were put up, which were used to turn corn mills; subsequently, while Lieutenant Austin was deputy governor, twelve others, and after he became governor fourteen more … (op. cit., p. vii).

In It is Never Too Late to Mend, the prison chaplain's nondescript character is transformed into Mr. Eden, a kind of Archangel Michael with superhuman persistence and a taste for melodramatic gestures, who insists that the Home Office make an inquiry into the den of cruelty which the prison becomes under Reade's pen:

The victims of the Inquisition would have gained but little by becoming the victims of the separate and silent system in … Gaol (Chapter 11, p. 104).

A thick dark pall of silence and woe hung over its huge walls. If a voice was heard above a whisper, it was sure to be either a cry of anguish or a fierce command to inflict anguish. Two or three were crucified (N.B. the emotional effect of this exaggerated use of the word) every day; the rest expected crucifixion from morning till night. No man felt safe an hour; no man had the means of averting punishment; all were at the mercy of a tyrant. Threats, frightful, fierce, and mysterious, hung like weights over every soul and body. Whenever a prisoner met an officer, he cowered and hurried, crouching by like a dog passing a man with a whip in his hand; and as he passed he trembled at the thunder of his own footsteps, and wished to Heaven they would not draw so much attention to him by ringing so clear through that huge silent tomb. When an officer met the governor, he tried to slip by with a hurried salute, lest he should be stopped, abused and sworn at (Chapter 18, pp. 211, 212).

It appears from the Report that Austin was a stern disciplinarian, attempting to maintain what he thought to be the ideal prison system, not a sadistic brute, as Hawes is. Mr. Justice Coleridge's words to Austin at his trial may seem a little complacent in view of the cruelties revealed in the Report, but they appear nearer the truth than Reade's emotional denunciation:

The Court are satisfied, from the character you have borne for a number of years, and from statements in your affidavits, that deliberate cruelty and inhumanity were never conceived by you.

The cumulative effect of Reade's slight but persistent exaggeration of the cruelties inflicted by Hawes and his officers, the suppression of any taint in Josephs's character or behaviour, and the creation of Mr. Eden, are not a convincing and impressive protest against cruelty, but a sensational picture of a melodramatic struggle between devilish brutality and angelic mercy, created, moreover, not from a lurid source³ but from a sober, unemotional Commissioners' Report.

The lurid quality of the imagination which worked upon the hard facts of Reade's research is amply illustrated by the description of Eden ejecting Hawes from the prison. The first paragraph might be a badly-rendered account of Michael expelling Lucifer from Heaven:

'Away! Away! Wash those red hands and that black soul in years and years of charity, in tears and tears of penitence, and in our Redeemer's blood. Begone, and darken and trouble us here no more.'

The cowed jailer shrank and cowered before the thunder and lightning of the priest, who, mild by nature, was awful when he rebuked an impenitent sinner out of Holy Writ. He slunk away, his knees trembling under him, and the first fiery seeds of remorse sown in his dry heart. He met the printing-press coming in, and the loom following it (naturally); he scowled at them and groaned. Evans held the door open for him with a look of joy that stirred all his bile again. He turned on the very threshold, and spat a volley of oaths upon Evans. Evans at this put down his head like a bull, and running fiercely with the huge door, slammed it close on his heel with such ferocity, that the report rang like a thunderclap through the entire building, and the ex-gaoler was in the street (Chapter 26, p. 286).

These words, written about a living and recently disgraced man, are in questionable taste. Also, Reade's attempt to arouse hatred against Austin by presenting the facts is defeated, for the modern reader, by the over-emphasis of the language and the melodramatic gestures used. The reader's mind, though perhaps responding to Reade's indignation, questions the facts, suspecting that they may be distorted by the violence of the author's feelings.⁴

It is Never Too Late to Mend can be described as a propaganda novel. In it Reade attempts to inculcate an emotion in the reader, hatred against Hawes and his system, rather than soberly to explore a problem affecting society. The situation is therefore distorted to make this propaganda plausible. Contrast Mrs. Gaskell's masterly attempt to see both sides of the employment problem in North and South, notwithstanding her intense sympathy with the workers' sufferings.

She, too, possessed the facts of the case. She had read intelligently on the subject and she lived in Manchester where she knew something of the people and their problems; she attended discussions at workmen's clubs and attempted, like her friend Susanna Winkworth, personally to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. But she used her facts, transmuted by sympathy and human understanding, to present a social conflict which makes its appeal long after the particular situation has lost its significance. To a lesser degree, Disraeli's Sybil is still good reading, in spite of the sentimental treatment of Sybil herself, because although it advocates the Young England movement, dead long since, this solution to England's problem gradually evolves after an exploration of English society in which flaws are evident in both aristocracy and Chartists. Reade's novel is not one of patient exploration, but of dogmatic statement.

The novel can be successfully used to explore the human implications of a social problem. It is not such a happy medium for propaganda, because the necessary distortion makes too sharp a divorce between the events in the novel and normal living.

When we turn to Hard Cash we find that the lunatic asylum scenes here also have a factual basis. In spite of Dr. Bushnan's protests, a glance at the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee on Lunatics (Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 11 April, 1859) confirms that there were grave cases of ill-treatment and illegal confinement in private lunatic asylums.⁵ Fifteen years after the publication of Hard Cash the Reverend Charles Garrett Jones wrote a pathetic comment on an article in the Pall Mall Budget which had criticised certain practices in private lunatic asylums and had suggested that closer inspection was necessary:

I wish it to be understood that I was cast into a ward, and there kept for 15 months with some of the worst cases, whose habits and manners were most disgusting … My life in Peckham Private Asylum I consider was much worse than it would have been, had I been imprisoned in Newgate Gaol.⁶

He maintains that, however poorly the inmates are clad and fed, relatives have to pay heavy bills. He describes the kind of trickery exposed in Hard Cash:

Relations are quite helpless against this form of extortion. If they pay a visit to the Asylum the patient is quickly dressed up in decent clothes taken from his own, or some other patient's wardrobe; he is conducted to a handsome suit of rooms, where perhaps the farce is played of sticking a cigar into his mouth, and making him cosy near a fire with a picture book on his knees, meanwhile a couple of attendants told off for special duty on the occasion are ready, with glib patter as to how kindly the patient is treated, so that the relatives go away quite comfortable … A fearful sense of abandonment and hopelessness falls upon the partially sane patient, who finds himself confined with human beings who are treated like brutes (ibid., p. 3).

And, after the novel, as Very Hard Cash, had appeared in All the Year Round a contributor wrote:

We all recollect the assaults made upon Mr. Charles Reade for his exposure of the abuses of the madhouse institutions, and many readers are yet disposed to suspect exaggeration, when the probability is that worse horrors have been actually committed; but which, for their unfitness for a work of art, have never yet found their way into a novel of real life ('The Spirit of Fiction', AYR, [27 July, 1867,] XVIII, p. 120).

The germ of Hard Cash was the case of Fletcher v. Fletcher, in which Reade had helped to free a sane, wealthy man from a private lunatic asylum. Alfred Hardie's confinement, at the will of his hard father who wants his money and his absence, is founded on fact.

At first sight it seems that Reade explores this case more impartially than the cruelties at Birmingham Prison. Alfred is subjected to unpleasant physical restraint at Silverton Grove House until he gives up all attempt to get free, but some of his keepers feel pity for him and even try to effect his escape. Reade indicates that all private lunatic asylums are not the same. At Dr. Wycherley's asylum, whither he is later moved, Alfred is treated like a gentleman and allowed books to continue his studies. Finally, at Drayton House, he himself wins respect although some of the other prisoners are cruelly treated.

These attempts to give a complete picture of private lunatic asylums may have been made by Reade out of deference to Dickens and Forster. At the conclusion of Very Hard Cash in All the Year Round 26 Dec., 1863, Dickens commented:

The statements and opinions of this Journal generally, are, of course, to be received as the statements and opinions of its Conductor. But this is not so, in the case of a work of fiction first published in these pages as a serial story, with the name of an eminent writer attached to it. When one of my literary brothers does me the honour to undertake such a task, I hold that he executes it on his own personal responsibility, and for the sustainment of his own reputation; and I do not consider myself at liberty to exercise that control over his text which I claim as to other contributions.

He was clearly disturbed by some of the ideas in the novel, and it has been suggested that the episode of the kindly Commissioner in Lunacy (Chapter 46, cf. AYR, Sat. 14 Nov., 1863) was introduced to appease Forster, who was himself a Commissioner and had been offended at some of the earlier episodes in the novel (cf. W. C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade and Collins: Sensation Novelists, N.Y. 1919, Chapter 3, p. 115).⁷

So the personal relationships involved in the serial publication of Very Hard Cash may have forced Reade to consider his facts concerning abuses in private lunatic asylums in a light less hysterical than that in which he viewed Lieutenant Austin's misdemeanours in It is Never Too Late to Mend. However, the central situation in Hard Cash is, none the less, given a startling explanation. Alfred's father is a banker, outwardly respectable and fabulously wealthy, but in secret he speculates with his children's money and takes the opportunity of David Dodd's apoplexy to rob him of £14,000. There are many exaggerated incidents which tax the reader's credulity. Alfred is lured to an asylum on his wedding morning, and the reader is spared none of the agonies of the shamed bride, Julia Dodd. Mrs. Archbold, an asylum keeper, is a vampire who pursues Alfred passionately until he impatiently rejects her love, whereupon she threatens him with vengeance. David Dodd is confined at Drayton House. Mrs. Dodd visits him, but Mrs. Archbold takes care that Alfred shall never see her. However, he manages to get a message into her parasol:

If you are a Christian, if you are human, pity a sane man here confined by fraud, and take this to the Board of Lunacy at Whitehall. Torn by treachery from her I love, my letters all intercepted, pens and paper kept from me, I write this with a toothpick and my blood on a rim of 'The Times'. God, direct it to someone who has suffered, and can feel for another's agony (Chapter 42, p. 476).

The combination of blood, toothpick and a rim of The Times makes it impossible for the reader at this point to take Alfred's plight seriously! Finally Alfred, in a melodramatic scene, escapes with David Dodd while the asylum is burning. Their lives are saved by Edward Dodd, Julia's brother, who has become, in a short space of time, remarkably proficient as a fireman. Alfred is proved sane in a court of law, gets his First Class and is married to Julia.

In Hard Cash Reade's hatred for cruelty bred by greed, and his admiration for generous feeling, for affection, for beauty and for the impulsiveness of youth, betrayed him into ludicrous exaggeration.

In The Quarterly Review, April 1863, appeared an article denouncing 'sensation novels', the literature which 'preaches to the nerves'. The writer explains the growth of this ephemeral kind of reading matter by the fashion of running serials in periodicals, the development of circulating libraries and the existence of railway bookstalls which offered exciting tales to relieve a tedious journey.

'A sensation novel, as a matter of course', continues the article, 'abounds in incident. Indeed, as a general rule, it consists of nothing else.'

Often it has a superficially didactic purpose:

Let a writer have a prejudice against the religion of his neighbour, against the government of his country, against the administration of the law … against the social position of women who have lapsed from virtue … against any institution, custom, or fact of the day—forthwith comes out a tale to exhibit in glowing colours the evil which might be produced by the obnoxious object in an imaginary case … heightened by every kind of exaggeration.

This is a fair comment on the prison scenes in It is Never Too Late to Mend, or on HardCash.

One sentence in the article is particularly interesting to a student of Reade's work:

The sensation novel, be it mere trash or something worse, is usually a tale of our own times. Proximity is, indeed, one great element of sensation.

So also, remarks the writer, is 'personality' and many a 'sensation novel' is written from contemporary incidents, the well-known characters faintly disguised. This kind of novel appeals to the reader's love of scandal and challenges his ingenuity to solve the puzzle of identity. In this way Reade used the Austin trial and the case of Fletcher v. Fletcher in It is Never Too Late to Mend and Hard Cash.

So two of Reade's most important didactic novels accord with a contemporary definition of a 'sensation novel', and from an examination of Reade's use of research in It is Never Too Late to Mend and Hard Cash it is obvious that even in the novels which had an overtly social purpose, he used his facts as a 'sensation' rather than a social novelist.⁸ The 'sensation novel' was the novelistic counterpart of the popular stage-melodrama and appealed to the same desire for crude excitement, and to this end Reade used his facts which were in themselves startling.⁹ And although it may be argued that an exaggerated treatment of them was justified to shock the reading public into thought, the evident distortion of fact proves that the novelist was, in part at least, satisfying the contemporary craving for 'sensation' rather than soberly exploring a social problem.

In the Preface to Hard Cash Reade protests against the 'little easy cant about Sensation Novelists' with which the madhouse scenes have been met.

'In reality', he continues, 'those passages have been written on the same system as the nautical, legal, and other scenes: the best evidence has been ransacked…'

This indicates a danger of his belief in facts as a novel's foundation. If they were facts, no matter of what kind, they were good and ensured artistic reality.¹⁰ When his mind, delighted by the unusual, led him to surprising and startling facts, the result would not be lurid 'sensation' but artistic truth. The 'sensation novelist' of the mid nineteenth century often used facts in this way, but without attempting to justify his practice by evolving a wrong-headed artistic theory, as did Reade.

To discover romance, wonder and horror in the facts of 'real life' was a profitable way of writing a novel in the mid decades of the nineteenth century. There was a large market for this kind of romanticism, possibly a debasement of the romanticism preached by Wordsworth in the early years of the nineteenth century—the wonder and delight in common things (cf. Mario Praz The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, O.U.P. 1956). Collins, Dickens and Reade all produced the 'sensation novels' which found eager readers and some bitter critics. The writer in the Edinburgh Review¹¹ attacked Dickens as well as Reade for his distortion of facts to produce 'sensation'—particularly in Little Dorrit. Each of the three writers, while favouring 'sensation', produced very individual 'sensation novels'. Dickens, in novels like Oliver Twist and Bleak House, took a broad, general problem, the working of the Poor Law or the transactions of the Chancery Court, conceived the problem in terms of imaginary human beings, set them against a powerfully-evoked background and relied for his effect on comedy and well-timed climaxes. Collins, in his best 'sensation novels', The Woman in White and The Moonstone, carefully worked out a plot which should tantalise the reader until the dramatic revelation at the end of the book. The subsidiary dramatic climaxes led to the last grand climax. Reade chose specific incidents which aroused his indignation because of their injustice or inhumanity, transferred them thinly disguised into his novel, and relied upon melodramatic climaxes and occasional direct harangues to the reader to get his indignation across. In these books he did not attempt to depict the upper classes or nobility.

There was a great variety of standard in the 'sensation novel' when Reade was writing. The 'sensation novelists' ranged from Dickens and Wilkie Collins to Mrs. Henry Wood and Miss Braddon.¹²It is Never Too Late to Mend and Hard Cash, in spite of their crudities, have their moments of sympathetic insight into the plights of the characters concerned and are inspired by a genuine zeal for reform, though they are not such good novels as Oliver Twist, with its powerful images of menacing evil and of isolated torment, or The Woman in White, a classic in suspense and plot-manipulation. Unfortunately, some of Reade's later novels, written for a fashionable public, such as A Woman Hater (1877) and A Perilous Secret (1884) come close to the empty excitement of Lady Audley's Secret.

The particular danger of the 'sensation novel' in its lowest form was its encouragement of 'crooked thinking'. The novelist pandered to his reader's love of the 'sensational' and the melodramatic while persuading him that he was assisting in the discussion of a 'serious moral problem' of the day. For example, the novelist revelled in the sordid story of an undergraduate's introduction to sensuality and vice, persuading himself and his readers that he was showing, by a high-minded moral story, the dangers of youthful liberty, as in Winwood Reade's Liberty Hall, Oxon. This muddled thinking, far from presenting the reader with moral truths, often produced statements of dubious accuracy and moral effect:

… when the soul is good at bottom, vice may be led back to virtue by a tender hand. The courtezan makes often the most faithful wife, the criminal the best Christian, the poacher the most upright gamekeeper and the rake the most sincere adviser. Real vice sickens in its own looking-glass, and regrets; the sinner mediocre is in most danger, for he smiles with his eyes blind-folded (Liberty Hall, Oxon. I, Chapter 2, p. 21. Charles J. Skeet, London, 1860).

The writer takes a small fragment of truth and twists it into a lie. It is true that a sincere conversion may take place after an evil life and that the courtezan may become a model wife, but the writer is inaccurate and makes sweeping statements unsupported by evidence—'makes often the most faithful wife'—and weights the scales sentimentally in favour of the intrinsic goodness of most courtezans. A vicious man may eventually realise the enormity of his crimes and turn to better things, but all vice does not 'sicken in its own looking-glass' as Winwood Reade would have us believe. His paragraph can be interpreted: better be a criminal, with 'sensational' adventures and an equally 'sensational' conversion, than a hum-drum sinner whose deeds are not interesting to the 'sensationalist'. Vice is so interesting (from the moral point of view, of course,) that the writer comes to feel a certain affection for it.

Reade's novels are not of this morbid kind. Even in the crudest of them, there is something virile about his writing, and there is no doubt that he was sincere in his desire for certain social reforms. But, for Reade, to emphasise was to caricature and, remembering the ogre Hawes in a novel purporting to expose the cruelties of the 'separate' system and the laxities of Governmental supervision in prisons, and the melodramatic Richard Hardie and arch-vampire Mrs. Archbold in the novel meant to explore the abuses of private lunatic asylums, 'we are bound to protest' with the writer in the Quarterly Review 'against the levity which mixes up the solemn reflections which belong to these' (moral) 'aspects of the question with the claptrap devices and theatrical artifices of a fourth-rate sensation story.'

Notes

¹ The edition of Reade's novels used for reference throughout this essay is the Library Edition, Chatto and Windus, London 1895-6.

²The Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Condition and Treatment of the Prisoners confined in Birmingham Borough Prison, and the conduct, management, and discipline of the said prison; together with the Minutes of Evidence, p.v. London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, for Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1854.

³ There are many instances, in Reade's fiction, of his use of lurid facts in such a way as to make them even more lurid. For example, the scenes described after the bursting of the reservoir in Put Yourself in His Place (see Wayne Burns, 'The Sheffield Flood: A Critical Study of Charles Reade's Fiction', PMLA, LXIII, 1948, pp. 686-695). But in these scenes Reade is wholly concerned with producing exciting fiction, not with propaganda for the purpose of social reform, which is the subject of my essay. A sensational source was not necessary to 'inflame his most dangerous sensibilities' (as Wayne Burns considers that Samuel Harrison's History of the Great Flood at Sheffield [London, 1864] inflamed them in Put Yourself in His Place), and a sober source was no guarantee of sober fiction when Reade worked. The Commissioners' Report on Birmingham Prison, which deals with startling facts, has nothing in common with 'the crudities and sentimentalities of Harrison's yellow journalism' (Wayne Burns, op. cit., p. 694); Reade's imagination was such that even soberly-stated facts became lurid.

⁴ On Reade's exaggeration of social abuses for which there was factual evidence see Emerson Grant Sutcliffe's comment in 'Fact, Realism, and Morality in Reade's Fiction', Studies in Philology, XLI, 1944, pp. 593, 594.

⁵ See particularly the Earl of Shaftesbury's comments pp. 14 and 39; Sir Erskine Perry's remarks p. 218. Also cf. Report from the Select Committee on Lunatics, printed 5 Aug., 1859, p. 35—evidence of cruelty in private asylums, and Report printed 30 July, 1877, p. 209—the case of Mrs. Petschler who was illegally confined in Macclesfield Asylum by her sister.

⁶ 'Extracts taken from the "Pall Mall Budget" of November 9th, 1878, by the Reverend Charles Garrett Jones, (Rector of Magdalen Laver, Essex), upon the Treatment of Lunatics in "Private Madhouses,'" British Museum copy, dated 1 June, 1885, p. 2.

⁷ At this point in my discussion I am indebted to a conversation with Mr. P. A., W. Collins, of Leicester University.

⁸ For a discussion of Reade's failure to produce a serious social drama partly because of his 'sensational' use of realistic effects see my essay in English, XII, 1958, No. 69, pp. 94-100.

⁹ 'He chose facts which were as violently colored as his own temperament,' Emerson Grant Sutcliffe, op. cit., p. 583. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that Reade found some of these facts in sober, unemotional documents, as I have tried to show above.

¹⁰ Wayne Burns makes a similar comment, op. cit., p. 694.

¹¹ July 1857. Quoted above.

¹² Reade much admired Miss Braddon and to her he dedicated his long short-story The Wandering Heir (appeared in the Christmas number of the Graphic, 1872).